Explain the significance of the imagery in each poem: William Wordsworth's "We are Seven," and Shakespeare's Sonnet 12.

The imagery used in William Wordsworth's "We are Seven,"
and Shakespeare's Sonnet 12 both deal with age and
death.

In Wordsworth's poem, the poet refers often to the
images of youth regarding the
child:

She was eight years
old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a
curl
That clustered round her
head.

And...

And
there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to
them....
Together round her grave we played,

My brother John and I.

These
stanzas describe the child in appearance or behavior.

Death
is also an ever-present theme in this poem.

"Two of us in the
church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother...
Two of us in the
church-yard lie,
Beneath the church-yard tree."
"Their graves are
green, they may be seen,"
The little Maid replied...
[and regarding
the little girl's sister:] Till God released her of her pain;
And then she
went away.

On the other hand, Sonnet 12's
images regarding age deal with the end of one's long life, in appearance and the
approach of death due to age.

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And sable curls all silver'd o'er with
white;
When lofty trees I see barren of
leaves...

Borne on the bier with white and bristly
beard

Since sweets and beauties do themselves
forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow; 
And nothing
'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes
thee hence.

The imagery in
the second poem points to silver hair, the "bristly beard." The beauty of youth passes
quickly as possessors of such things watch others grow, and "Time's scythe" refers to
the timeless march of aging that draw each person on the earth closer to death, saved
only by what is left behind in one's children
("breed").

Imagery is presented from opposite ends of the
aging process—and death, and so the mood for each poem is extremely different.
Wordsworth's little girl has seen the passing of two siblings, but in her mind, they are
no farther "gone" than siblings who have gone to sea or moved to another town. The
speaker is mystified as to her insistence that they are not "gone" at all. While he is
perhaps saddened for the little girl, her separation from her siblings is a detail that
she dismisses, insisting to the end that they are right there, and she spends time with
them, communing in spirit with them at their gravesides while she eats or
sews.

However, in Sonnet 12, the mood is decidedly
different. Death comes not to the young, but to the old, and there is regret in the
passing of youth and beauty. Death is personified as relentless, a shadow ever looking
over one's shoulder, and the mood of the poem is much
darker.

For two poems dealing with the same topic of death
and the age accompanying it, there is a certain irony that the child suffers no regrets
or fears of death, even though her siblings have died young, whereas there is dread and
seeming regret as time overtakes those who have lived longer, and the aging brings
sadness not only because of the impending loss of life, but the "vanity" in losing the
bloom of youth on that journey.